We contribute to the literature on private financing of intergenerational public goods, focusing on climate change mitigation. We consider, in a general equilibrium overlapping generations (OLG) model with environmental externalities, a contract between successive generations, whereby agents of...

During the last few years and because of the low oil prices in particular, the increasing awareness of the unsustainability of subsidized systems led several MENA countries to take steps to lower subsidies, which have been part of the social contract for decades, especially as far as the energy...

We contribute to the literature on private financing of intergenerational public goods, focusing on climate change mitigation. We consider, in a general equilibrium overlapping generations (OLG) model with environmental externalities, a contract between successive generations, whereby agents of...

Pleshkov, Alexey A. - National Research University Higher School of Economics - 2014

Language theory is an important part of Hobbes’ intellectual legacy. Nevertheless, it seems that the value of language can be understood only within political sphere. The role and place of language in Hobbes’ political theory should be examined intimately. What can language say about...

In this paper, we argue that the Arab spring can be understood as a violent criticism of and attack against the post-Independence social contract that prevailed in most Middle East and North African countries. We show that this social contract, characterized by the combination of high levels of...

We study the incentives of noncooperative players to play a cooperative game. That is, we look for individually rational, redistributive, pre-game agreements enacted in order to coordinate towards efficient equilibrium play. Contrasting with standard Nash equilibrium analysis, we assume that...

Political philosophy relies on three alternative types of theory to explain social order. The first, is order anarchy, built on the system of spontaneous Humean conventions. They are equilibria, self-enforcing or enforced by the participants’ own contingent strategies and involve no central,...

The Eurocrisis challenges our definition of a common future in Europe. As first step, this article describes a vision of a future Europe without the Euro as state of political and economic marginalisation. I am contrasting this vision by demanding European values and civic duties that make the...

Taxing small deposits used to be a taboo in European politics – but why? This contribution re-assesses the protection of small deposits from an angle that has not received much attention in the current debate: the politico-philosophical, ordo-liberal, and social-political perspectives, arguing...

The recent renaissance of work on conventions, informal institutions, and social norms has reminded us that between the state and individual choice is a network of informal social rules that are the foundation of our cooperative social life. However, even those who appreciate the importance of...

I argue that social-contract theory cannot succeed because reasonable people may always disagree, and that social-contract theory is irrelevant to the problem of the legitimacy of a form of government or of a system of moral rules. I note the weakness of the appeal to implicit agreement, the...

Most meta-ethical theories fail either for lack of real content or because they fail to make needed distinctions, or to give sufficient account of what a moral theory is about. Positing that values are intuited is useless or worse, since the very problem that gives rise to the need for morals is...

In the present essay, by utilizing game theory we present a model of choice by actors to explain how change comes about. Then by using ancient and modern sources of literature, we analyze the theory of the social contract as a historical phenomenon that first appeared during the classical period...